Photography

Stock images are a quick way to add pictures to your website, but in his post on Mashable, – 5 Easy Tweaks to Increase Conversions ,Tim Ash warns that by not using brand-specific photos you could be not only damaging your brand but reducing your conversion rate.

No matter what you do or make you’ll want to maintain that all important edge over your competitors.

Although you may be in the same market place you’ll hopefully have found a niche that sets you apart from the crowd and creates you USP (Unique Sales Proposition)

Your brand must be the priority and how you illustrate it will reflect directly on how you’re judged by potential customers, so any picture you use must be specific, relevant and not there just to fill a space on your page.

This is why it’s worth remembering that if the image is yours, or if it’s been specifically shot to support your brand, you control its use, the keywords and metadata of that picture and this can significantly enhance the optimization of your website or blog.

Remember free or cheap stock imagery is just that, and will do your product or service no favours and your time spent searching for the right image isn’t really free, especially if you could be engaged in some revenue producing activity instead.

As I said in my January post when I asked if you’d “share your toothbrush with a stranger”, the advantages of having pictures taken which are brand-specific to your business cannot be emphasised strongly enough, a point echoed by Tim Ash

Even the finest pictures in a library, often professionally taken and frequently “out-takes”, from a commissioned photo-shoot, are unlikely to have true relevance to your particular business.

The best of the others will have been snapped up by someone else, probably one of your competitors, which immediately destroys your customer’s confidence, making them question the credibility of your photo and also putting doubts over the originality of your business.

So you trawl, ever deeper, into the library, trying to find something unique, spending more valuable time, looking for the safe option, a picture you’ve never seen before, but this is neither safe nor can you be sure of its exclusivity, most library photos have been used over and over.

So even if you don’t recognise it, the chances are extremely high that someone looking at your website will, and view that photo, you thought was great, to be jaded; and those that aren’t, are probably pictures of such poor quality that you really shouldn’t be using them anyway.

There’s a famous but well-worn quote by the fire fighter Red Adair, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur” – so typified by the willingness of so many brand owners to put their products at risk for the sake of a good photo.

If you would like some truly original pictures for use on your website, please contact “The product photographer” from West Berkshire today and let me shoot something special for you.

A great night out with friends, birthday celebrations, had a baby, got engaged, honeymoon or the holiday of a lifetime, visited an elderly relative, seen your best friend off at the airport?

You probably grabbed your smartphone or point and click camera to take some memorable pictures to keep, to create those amazing memories.

These moments of life are precious, something to keep for posterity, treasures to look back on in years to come; so what do you do with them?

Well, judging by the number cries for help on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, too many people never bother to do anything beyond leaving these irreplaceable images on the phone or stored on the SD card in the camera.

All those treasured moments and sentimental occasions could be lost forever, if your phone or card is lost, damaged, stolen or corrupted.

Someone I know, just had one 64 Gb SD memory card, which they used in their camera to record important business images; they never uploaded them to a computer, so when the card suddenly stopped working it was a disaster. They were stuck, there was no copy, no back up, so when the card was corrupted the only way to get access to the pictures was by employing an expensive recovery company, and even then only some of the images could be recovered.

As a professional photographer, I have to ensure all my images are securely and safely stored, not only for my own credibility, but in the case of some of my work, because of client confidentiality, so it really surprises me when I hear stories of enthusiasts and amateurs who store their images on camera cards, instead of uploading them to a computer hard-drive or to a cloud facility, like Flickr or Dropbox .

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, is an old fashioned proverb, but it stands good for the digital age too.

Always make sure you upload your precious photos and videos to somewhere safe, with a backup and check that the backup works.

If the picture’s worth taking, please keep it safe and don’t end up putting impassioned pleas on Facebook and Twitter like this poor person:

“…Lost an old black Samsung phone at boot-sale this morning, broken screen really not worth anything, but full of very sentimental pictures from Xmas and daughter being born…”

Professionally, I always use small capacity camera storage cards, rather than those with massive space, that way you’re less likely to lose everything.

When I use my smartphone to take pictures and these are usually the sentimentally important ones, they always automatically upload to Dropbox, a great solution if you need to be sure that your images are safe from harm.

Instagram’s assumed acquisition of intellectual property rights, simply based on their reconstituted terms and conditions, is nothing short of theft.

Yes, uploading personal or professional images to their website is our choice and if their Ts & Cs attempt to take away our copyright, we also have the choice not to take part.

But changing the rules after people have already submitted their pictures does not give them the right to snatch away our creativity and certainly doesn’t entitle them to make a profit from them.

If the likes of Cartier Bresson, Ansel Adams or any of our other pioneering photographers had been alive in the 21st Century they would certainly have embraced the new digital techniques and multitude of ways in which images can be presented, viewed and shared, delighting in the flexibility of Flickr, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter to name a few.

None of the great artists, photographers and designers would have accepted the theft of their intellectual property by some of these media behemoths and they too would have been forced to reconsider the safety of releasing their pictures to the digital world.

It’s many years since the BBC in the UK snatched the rights to any pictures submitted to them whether for competitions, weather pictures or as news photos sent in by viewers.

Many innocent amateur photographers keen to see their pictures on screen sacrifice their rights by freely giving images to the organisation and spectacularly erode one channel of revenue for the professional freelance who once made money from speculative submissions.

The photo scoop is no more, thanks to mobile phones and other digital capture devices every one of us is now a potential news photographer, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, because it has opened up the world to the immediacy of drama, tragedy and happiness, but the ease with which publishers now take away the commercial value of creativity is an extremely worrying trend.

As a professional photographer I am now cautious of where I submit my pictures; living in a world where legal boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred and with territorial copyright laws no longer effective there is no room for complacency.

The mighty National Geographic have signalled their disquiet by considering whether to retain an Instagram presence and the so called celebrity market are leaving for fear of the unrestricted impact the loss of control of their images could have.

Organisations like Facebook have the belief that the creativity of the human brain is theirs by right. Surely, the time has arrived when the might of all creative minds both visual and auditory, demands recognition for their skills and cannot have their intellectual rights usurped on a whim.

I first watched ‘firewalking’ in 1962 on a black and white television during one of David Attenborough’s early wildlife documentaries when he visited a remote tribe who used it as a right of passage into adult life.

How could anyone walk on red hot coals without burning the soles off their feet? To a twelve year old this was quite extraordinary and I have to say left a question in my mind which has never gone away.

50 years on I now know the answer, because I’ve done it and it’s all thanks to business networking and a chance meeting with Tracey Miller and her partner George Swift who run a motivation and coaching business called Bigger, Brighter, Bolder.

I suppose we all have a ‘bucket list’ and meeting up with Tracey has given me the chance to cross something off mine and experience a couple of the most exhilarating moments of my life.

When she told me that George was a qualified Firewalking instructor I needed to know more and that’s why I ended up sitting in a room with seven other ‘mad fools’ at the Regency Park Hotel in Thatcham in a seminar that would culminate in walking across red hot coals.

As we sat and listened and self analysed our reasons for being there and what we wanted to get out of the experience, George took us through an emotional roller coaster of highs and lows of our lives and how these influence self esteem and confidence building.

Raking over the coals

After about 2 hours we all went outside to see the fire being lit and begin to understand the magnitude of what was going to happen.

Back inside we were all mentally prepared for the firewalk but George had another challenge for us before the big one, each one of us would break an archer’s arrow simply by placing the point in the soft part of your throat with the other end wedged against a block of wood and walking onto it. Testing how strong the shaft of this arrow was by placing it between two hands and pushing was quite alarming especially when I realised the metal point would be in the most vulnerable part of my neck.

It seemed strange putting on protective goggles to save my eyes from damage when I was about to stab myself in the throat but in fact we all successfully met the challenge without injury.

With time now ticking and the fire outside reaching its hottest point the time had arrived to face the great challenge.

A mound of red hot embers greeted us and James, one of George’s fellow instructors, began to prepare the fire bed by shovelling these onto the turf. Still glowing red, a laser directed thermometer checked the temperature and gave a reading of 1300 degrees Celsius.

The fire awaits

The moment had now arrived and carefully following our instructions, one by one we walked confidently over the coals, about 4 steps, into the supporting arms of George and having any pieces of ash rinsed of with a hose.

What did it feel like, my memory was not of heat but of the sort of crunch you get walking on deep snow, yet I had walked over red hot coals which by now were around 800 degrees and still had skin on my feet and no blisters.

Knowing I may not get the opportunity again, I walked a second time and in fact when fresh coals from the fire were added to bring the temperature back up I walked a third time and myself a sneaky look down at my feet on the red glowing coals, to see what I was doing.

I walk the coals

This was a truly momentous challenge and the empowerment I achieved with that first step onto the coals cannot be adequately described in words.

How could I have expected when six years ago my good friend Nigel Morgan of Morgan PR introduced me to the power of business networking for my commercial photography business it would have led me to achieve something so personally amazing.

I’m pretty sure that when Google made their You Tube video to promote the search and hashtag improvements to Google+ they had no intention of offending their audience but the careless use of hands and fingers is something all photographers and indeed videographers need to be aware of.

Is this what Google really think about their customers or should they be more aware of hand gestures and how they are interpreted?

Nearly all professional photographers will have encountered the character in the back row of a group shot casually giving a two fingered salute which sometimes escapes the eagle eye of the editor and gets published but this slip by Google illustrates how important it is to check your pictures and videos before you publish them.

Some people use their hands in an expressive way and used properly this can be a powerful addition to any visual presentation but we need to be aware of how these movements are seen by the viewer.

When I first looked at this video my unconscious mind was suddenly jolted by what I thought I’d seen on screen; now some would say any offence is in the eye of the beholder and maybe my mind is not as clean as it might be, but I can’t be alone in being momentarily shocked by what I thought Google was saying to me.

The lesson from this has to be make sure you examine any picture or video carefully before you publish, and always get several other people to look at it too in case, like me, their minds are not as innocent as they would like.

The incredible power of electronic media for recommendation or condemnation can easily make or break a business.

Being a commercial photographer based inWest Berkshire, I understand how important visual impressions are, but these are secondary to the perceptions people get from other sources about the way companies support and assist their customers.

Following my post about British Gas and how they didn’t react to my comments on Twitter, I have since discovered they do have a social media awareness and they do monitor it.

Soon after my ‘tweet’ about them not following up on telephone complaints and asking if anyone knew if British Gas were active on Twitter they ‘tweeted’ me asking how they could help and that if I followed them and sent a Direct Message (DM) with the details of my complaint they would look into it.

Bearing in mind I had waited days to no avail for a telephone call from the British Gas call centre I realised how quickly criticism launched on a public social media platform evoked a reaction.

Now, I’m delighted that with Twitter’s intervention I’ve been able to get my complaint dealt with satisfactorily and agreed a settlement for my lost time, but I have concerns that anyone in business who isn’t keeping their finger on the social media pulse could find their reputation being damaged without them knowing.

If you’re not on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin or don’t have a social media presence , you may never know what people are saying about you on the internet, yet wonder why your product or service isn’t selling and customers seem to be avoiding you.

For this reason alone it’s essential that you monitor key words about your business, even if it’s only the company name, otherwise you could be the last person to know something’s wrong.

We all love recommendation and positive reviews but we must also be aware of malicious comments that can destroy a reputation. How many restaurants and hotels have suffered as a result of bad reviews on sites like Trip Advisor?

We should never forget that as individuals all our tastes are different and what we think is good may be someone else’s worst nightmare; but without knowing what’s being said, what steps can you take to correct any problems. This is why it’s essential that any business that relies on word of mouth recommendation understands and acknowledges the power of electronic media and no matter how large or small has an active policy of monitoring what’s being said about their company.

The greatest photo in the world showing the most fantastic product or service cannot overcome negative perceptions created by words so always listen to what others are saying about you and know how any people working for you are handling complaints.

Image is not just a picture it’s all about looking after your business and caring for your customers.

Anyone in business will tell you that the most important route to success is going the extra mile and keeping the customer happy by giving them what they think they want.

As a commercial photographer I know this better than most since in the digital age everyone’s a photographer and the majority of clients have a preconceived idea of how they want to look or how their product should be presented.

By listening to what they expect and guiding them around the practical obstacles I get the chance to build a relationship and show them the value of using a professional expert and establishing the magic of rapport.

This kind of personal attention is what sets small business apart from the impersonal multi-nationals who generally seem to adopt the attitude of we’ll give you what we want to, not what you need.

Having spent yesterday afternoon waiting for a British Gas engineer to carry out a routine central heating inspection; don’t you love the way they give time slots and then just before it’s due to elapse ring to say they can’t get there.

I got a call at 10 to 6 in the evening, apologising that they hadn’t been able to fit me in and offering me the first call of a 2 hour slot the next morning.

Accepting that “stuff happens” and it must be difficult to schedule so many jobs I agreed but as my allotted time disappears into the distance, I guess I’ve been stood up again.

The trouble is that this promise was pure British Gas “hot air”; they hadn’t told the engineer what they had agreed with me, so his work sheet said between 8 am and noon, he finally turned up at 10-15am, not his fault.

The main lesson we can all learn is not to make promises you can’t keep and certainly don’t lie, always be aware of the damage failing to keep them can result in.

I know that as a small business I always try to go the extra mile and give added value to my customers, if big business replicated this attitude people may be inclined to spend more with them and growth would begin to return to the economy.

The other lesson is when you do mess up, and it happens; make sure that your apology is sincere and any action necessary is prompt. “I’ll get my supervisor to call you”, just doesn’t cut it especially when they don’t bother to ring back.

Why do these utility companies spend so much on telephone cold calling and doorstep selling when they can’t supply what they offer, my list is growing Talk – Talk, British Gas, all credit to BT who at least try to resolve complaints with BT Care.

Maybe these large corporations should be buying their customer relations training from the small businesses that know how to treat their valuable clients properly.

My good friend Nigel Morgan at Morgan PR frequently posts about large organisations ignoring the power of social media and how great an impact this can have on reputation if you ignore Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the myriad of other social networks your shareholders could be exceedingly unhappy.

In some ways I’m grateful that my time waiting in for British Gas hasn’t been entirely wasted and I’ve written this blog post.

Five minutes before I left, Nigel rang me and suggested I bring my laptop so that he could tweet pictures as I took them, so dashing out of the door I grabbed what I thought I’d need.

Not knowing if the venue had wi-fi available I planned to shoot using a DSLR and upload to the computer, do a quick tweak and resize them and pass them on a USB stick to Nigel so that he could integrate them as the questions were answered.

What I hadn’t expected was that the venue had set up a stage in a drama studio with thick black curtains as a backdrop and incredibly high black painted ceiling, and very low lighting levels.

I immediately realised my chances of using available light were nil and with nothing to bounce flash off I had no alternative but to use flash directed straight at the speakers and any hope of including the audience would be even more of a challenge with the dark surroundings acting like a massive sponge, mopping up the light. Although not a new situation for me, I spent years of my youth crawling around potholes and caves and of course working in darkrooms, these sort of challenges make you think on your feet.

With the male members of the panel being traditionally dressed in dark suits achieving definition between them and the background was essential if disembodied heads were to be avoided.

Add to this the large bottles of water sitting on the desk in front of the panellists just waiting to reflect back at me every bit of light I threw at them I was not optimistic about the outcome of the evening.

But with some careful balancing of apertures and shutter speeds to make the most of any light there was and some gentle manipulation in Photoshop, I achieved my goal.

What’s the first thing you do if you know someone important is coming to visit, either at home or at work?

The chances are you’ll start to tidy up and put the things you’ve never got round to clearing up away in cupboards and drawers, then giving the loo a good clean and making sure the towels are spotless.

This happens in business too, whether private or public, and as a professional photographer I’ve often witnessed the frantic attempts by public service and corporate management to keep up appearances when an important dignitary or celebrity visit is announced.

The extremes to which this happens can vary from complete redecoration and replacement of toilet seats before a Royal visit or just making sure the ‘girly calendars’ have been taken down before the CEO’s wife arrives.

Probably the worst instance I witnessed was when a hospital cleaner was castigated by the trust’s Chief Executive, in front of patients and staff, for not completely removing an old stain from carpet in reception which had been ignored for years but suddenly took on vital importance, half an hour before the minister of health was due to visit.

When did the Minister of Justice last visit a courtroom that hadn’t been sanitised and prepared with a line up of selected guests, to replace the normal occupants of criminals, witnesses and victims of crime who are required to spend endless hours in these unsavoury surroundings?

When did the politicians and healthcare executives meet real patients who haven’t been carefully screened and selected by hospital PR managers?

When did the company president see the shop floor in its true unpolished working condition?

Brushed under the carpet

These visitors are all living a carefully choreographed illusion and this provides the basis for not understanding what happens every day and passes for normal.

Maybe this is why these politicos and dignitaries have such unrealistic experiences of how our public services, companies and institutions actually run and therefore fail to understand the problems.

Fly on the wall television documentaries have tried to recreate conditions with the boss working incognito on the shop floor, but whenever a film crew is present this will provoke some element of suspicion and consequently distortion will occur.

The only way a VIP or even an inspector will get to see the true picture is to arrive unannounced and unaccompanied, with absolutely no prior hint of a visit.

Transparency is the new political watch word if that is true, why do we conceal the real picture from the very people who need to see it.

Do you have a sweet smile? – that’s the question millions of Canadians are being asked by confectionery manufacturer Maynards.

The company, probably best known in the UK for their wine gums, are offering a unique opportunity for someone to be immortalised in sugar, by running a competition to find the “Face of Maynards”.

They’re asking the sweet-toothed Canadians to upload photos of themselves to the company’s Facebook page from where they will then select 10 finalists, one of which will have their face morphed into candy caricatures and become the face of Maynards, with their image appearing on the packaging too.

As a commercial photographer in West Berkshire, with an interest in the reactions and reticence of people to have their photographs taken and how this varies between generations I’ll be fascinated to see how popular this competition proves to be.

The face chosen will be the one that best represents one of the company’s existing popular Canadian products, Sour Patch Kids, Fuzzy Peach, Sour Cherry Blasters,orSwedish Berries and the facial expression must be seen to match with the branding and personality of Maynards.

As well as being immortalised in sugar, the winner will get a year’s supply of the sweets, $5000 in cash and a trip to Toronto for a photo-shoot with top Canadian celebrity portrait photographer Chris Buck as well as a visit to the Maynards production line to see how the sweets are made.

To ensure the best possible image for the competition Chris has written a short guide to taking a good portrait photo to go with the promotion.

Sadly, this competition isn’t open to anyone living outside Canada but as a part of the Kraft Foods group, which controversially acquired the much loved chocolate maker Cadburys in the UK, I wonder if we’ll be seeing a similar competition producing look-a-like sculpted Cream Eggs as an Easter attraction, sometime soon?